Noida, Mar 8 (PTI) Landing in Noida for a wedding did not turn out to be fun for a wanted liquor and drug trafficker, who was nabbed by the Uttar Pradesh STF ahead of the function, officials said on Friday.

Rinku Rathi, aged around 50, is allegedly an inter-state smuggler and carried a reward of Rs 50,000 on his arrest declared by the Banda Police, they said.

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Rathi has allegedly been trafficking liquor procured from Haryana to parts of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and even to dry states like Bihar and Gujarat, according to the UP STF.

He has also allegedly been involved in drug trafficking from Odisha and nearby areas to Delhi NCR, including Noida and Greater Noida, the agency said.

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"Rathi, who hails from Ghaziabad, was held in the Surajpur area here by the Noida unit of the Special Task Force (STF) on Thursday evening," Additional Superintendent of Police (UP STF) Raj Kumar Mishra said.

"Rathi had arrived here for a wedding function. The accused was on his way to the wedding venue when the STF team caught him near Durga Talkies on the way to the Malakpur village around 8 pm," Mishra added.

According to the STF, Rathi had started working in 1998 as a truck driver for a transport agency in Meerut in western UP and by 2010, he started his own cargo transport business in Haridwar, Uttarakhand.

In 2018, Rathi and his partner Amit were arrested by the Delhi Police for allegedly illegally transporting a large consignment of intoxicating cough syrup. The duo was jailed for four months, the agency said.

After being released from jail, he started a transport agency in the name of Rathi Transport in Modinagar, Ghaziabad, and along with the liquor smugglers of Haryana, he allegedly started smuggling the illegal liquor made in Haryana and Chandigarh to Gujarat, Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh earning huge profits, it said.

He was caught by the police for alleged liquor smuggling in Rajasthan in 2021, in Bihar in 2022, and in Gujarat in 2023, according to the STF.

In 2023, he got acquainted with Manish, a resident of Haryana's Rohtak, who used to smuggle ganja from Andhra Pradesh and Odisha border. Along with him, Rathi allegedly started smuggling illegal ganja in Delhi NCR and Haryana, the agency said.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)